Joe Manchin didn’t mince his words on federal regulators’ newly proposed carbon pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants.
“They’re crazy,” Manchin said during a news conference Wednesday. “Totally insane.”
West Virginia’s Democratic senior senator rendered his verdict before the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its proposal the next day.
Thursday morning wasn’t over before Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., Republican Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Patrick Morrisey, and other state political leaders voiced similar disapprovals.
“This is the Clean Power Plan times 10,” Capito added in a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Finalized in 2015, the Clean Power Plan was an Obama administration rule designed to restructure the nation’s electricity generation mix. The Obama-era EPA projected the rule would decrease coal-fired generation from 38% to 27% of the nation’s power mix by 2030.
Manchin and Capito opposed the rule, characterizing it as an assault on coal and the state’s economy.
The rule never took effect. The Supreme Court put it on hold following a lawsuit led by West Virginia under Morrisey, who called the plan an “attack on coal.”
The country surpassed the plan’s coal reduction target before the decade was over anyway.
Last year, renewable generation surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time.
But West Virginia has clung to coal. Coal comprised 91% of West Virginia’s electricity in 2021, 16 percentage points more than the next-highest coal percentage, Missouri.
As they did after the Clean Power Plan proposal, Manchin and Capito objected to the EPA’s latest plan to crack down on carbon pollution as a strike against energy reliability.
Manchin reported making roughly $2.5 million from 2017 through 2021 from stock he owns in Enersystems Inc., the coal brokerage he founded in 1988, in Senate financial disclosures. Manchin has denied that his vested coal interests have influenced his policymaking.
“I’ve got to have the power and the backup to run the horsepower to run the country,” Manchin said Wednesday. “That’s coal and gas.”
The electricity that backlogged renewable energy projects in West Virginia could produce rivals the state’s current coal capacity.
West Virginia’s capacity of solar, storage and wind projects in Mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection’s project queue totaled just under 10,000 megawatts as of April 1, according to a PJM presentation before state lawmakers Tuesday. West Virginia’s already installed coal capacity was roughly 12,500 megawatts.
Legislation enacted last year with critical support from Manchin is designed to hasten further power sector decarbonization.
Opposed by all congressional Republicans, the Inflation Reduction Act extended investment and production tax credits for renewable power credited as a driving force behind recent renewable energy investments throughout the country.
Massachusetts-based Form Energy’s planned iron-air battery plant in Weirton is one of 46 clean energy manufacturing facilities or facility expansions American Clean Power listed as announced since the law’s passage in an analysis last month. American Clean Power is a renewable energy industry group.
“[I]t’s a really big bill,” Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action, a Seattle-based climate advocacy group, said during a webinar hosted by climate organizations on the EPA’s proposal Friday. “It’s really going to be transformative, and we’ve already started to see that.”
A March report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates avoided sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will prevent 4,200 to 18,000 premature deaths and $45 billion to $190 billion in health damages. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a Department of Energy laboratory.
The EPA estimates its newly proposed carbon pollution standards would yield $64 billion to $85 billion in public health and climate benefits from 2028 to 2042. In 2030 alone, the proposed rule would prevent an estimated 1,300 premature deaths, over 800 hospital and emergency room visits, more than 300,000 cases of asthma attacks and 66,000 lost work days, according to the EPA.
“What I haven’t seen is the cost. At what cost?” Capito said. “If the benefit is $85 billion, what is the cost in terms of lost jobs, more health care, poverty, health conditions, loss of property values, all the other things that occur when you do a steep decline like this is?”
The EPA’s climate and health benefits include the value of climate change impacts, such as human health effects, changes in agricultural productivity, property damage from increased flood-risk natural disasters, disruption of energy systems, environmental migration and risk of conflict.
The EPA’s regulatory impact analysis estimates increases in 2028, 2030 and 2035 totaling 61,000 job-years and a decrease of 19,000 job-years in 2040 related to construction of new capacity. A job-year is one job for one year.
The agency projects a net estimated decrease in recurring employment of about 25,000 job-years from 2028 to 2040, which it said was a “small percentage” of 2019 power sector employment of roughly 900,000 generation-related jobs.
The EPA’s estimated $64 billion to $85 billion in public health and climate benefits are net benefits that factor in compliance costs of $10 billion to $14 billion from 2028 to 2042.
“There’s going to be no convincing me that these kinds of drastic regulations are not going to cause any harm to our state,” Capito said.
The EPA’s newly proposed standards take a hands-off approach to coal-fired units until 2030, giving the power sector the rest of the decade to prepare infrastructure replacements and assess what has been a rapidly growing renewable power landscape.
“The EPA looks at the reality on the ground that the coal fleet is really old and a lot of those plants may retire over the next 10 or 15 years, totally independent of these new standards,” University of California Santa Barbara climate policy researcher Leah Stokes said.
West Virginia’s political leaders are opposing a proposal whose most stringent requirement for coal-fired plants isn’t slated to apply to the coal fleet powering American Electric Power and FirstEnergy utilities in the state.
What would apply, the proposal’s supporters say, are health benefits too great to pass up.
“We have a moral responsibility to support strong limits on smokestack emissions, which harm children’s health and disproportionately impact communities already overburdened by pollution,” said Lucia Valentine, West Virginia organizer for Moms Clean Air Force, a national environmental advocacy nonprofit.
‘Paying someone to not harm you’
Under the proposed rule, existing coal-fired plants retiring before 2032 would keep current emissions limits, as would coal-fired plants to retire before 2035 that have an annual capacity factor, or use rate, of 20% or lower.
Coal-fired plants operating past 2031 but closing before 2040 would have to co-fire 40% with natural gas. Coal-fired plants operating in 2040 and beyond would have to use carbon capture and storage technology with 90% capture of carbon.
Limits would go into place in 2030.
The projected lifespans for the three coal-fired plants in Marshall, Mason and Putnam counties supporting American Electric Power’s West Virginia-serving utilities end in 2040.
The projected end-of-life date for FirstEnergy’s Harrison Power Station in Harrison County is 2040. FirstEnergy’s Fort Martin Power Station in Monongalia County has a projected end-of-life date of 2035. But Fort Martin could close sooner if the company and state regulators agree buying the soon-to-shutter, coal-fired Pleasants Power Station in Pleasants County would be a more economic option, albeit one FirstEnergy has proposed ratepayers pay at least $3 million for up to 12 months to support keeping open while the company considers whether to acquire the plant.
Spokespeople for AEP and FirstEnergy said the companies are reviewing the new rule proposal.
AEP spokesperson Scott Blake said the company has slashed carbon dioxide emissions by 66% since 2005 and plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2045. The utility expects renewables to comprise over half of its capacity by 2032, Blake said.
AEP has projected the share of hydro, wind, solar and pumped storage in its generation mix will rise to 53% in 2032, up from 23% in 2022. The share of coal in its generation mix will fall from 41% in 2022 to 19% in 2032, the company has projected.
The EPA’s new proposal includes no co-firing or carbon capture requirements for natural gas plants that operate at 20% capacity or less and potential use of carbon capture and storage or co-firing low-emitting hydrogen. The proposal would require high-use gas-fired plants to use carbon capture technology with 90% capture of carbon by 2035 or co-firing 30% with low-emitting hydrogen by 2032 that increases to 96% by 2038.
The EPA said it had determined carbon capture and storage technology satisfies its criteria for what it considers the best system of emissions reduction, contending that technology substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions and is highly cost-effective.
But critics of carbon capture technology, which captures carbon generated by burning fossil fuels before it’s released into the atmosphere, observe it’s unproven at commercial scale.
Sean O’Leary, senior researcher with Johnstown, Pennsylvania-based pro-renewable energy think tank Ohio River Valley Institute, said ratepayers and taxpayers could have to foot an “absurdly high” power bill if carbon capture and storage is implemented.
The Inflation Reduction Act enhanced a tax credit for carbon capture from $50 to $85 per ton. With that tax credit increase, O’Leary estimated a coal-fired plant could be paid hundreds of millions of dollars more for creating and sequestering carbon emissions it creates than for producing electricity.
“Put another way, we would pay plant owners a huge premium to not harm us with their emissions,” O’Leary said in an email. “In other contexts, paying someone to not harm you is called a protection racket.”
Carbon capture, use and storage is an umbrella term for technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and uses it to create products or store it underground.
The AEP-controlled, coal-fired Mountaineer plant in Mason County was the site of an aborted, Department of Energy-supported carbon capture project from 2009 to 2011.
AEP withdrew from the initiative at the end of the definition phase, citing a lack of legislative and regulatory support for cost recovery it had anticipated when it applied for the project, according to a 2021 Government Accountability Office audit report.
“We lost a lot of money on that project,” Christopher Beam, former president of AEP subsidiary Appalachian Power, said at a state Public Energy Authority meeting last year. “So we’re not willing, I don’t think, to take on another one.”
AEP had proposed to capture at least 90% of carbon dioxide emitted in a 235-megawatt flue gas stream, including capabilities for permanently injecting carbon dioxide into underground formations near the capture facility, according to the Government Accountability Office.
It likely would cost $850 million to $1 billion to build a new project for the same level of carbon capture for 235 megawatts, according to a briefing document discussed at a September meeting between Manchin, Beam and Public Service Commission Chairman Charlotte Lane.
The Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-headquartered zero-emissions climate policy firm, has embraced the prominent role of carbon capture in the EPA’s proposal.
John Thompson, Clean Air Task Force technology and markets director, predicted carbon capture technology costs would decline.
The Clean Air Task Force predicted in an analysis released earlier this month that “learning-by-doing” would result in additional cost declines in carbon capture installations.
Fossil fuel power plant operators could decide to shut down plants rather than retrofit them with carbon capture technology.
“Against the backdrop of our region’s grid operator warning of forthcoming reliability challenges due to baseload generation retirements, EPA once again sets its sights on West Virginia’s economy and our way of life with a policy undercutting grid reliability,” Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia Executive Director Charlie Burd said in an email.
Burd was referencing a February report from PJM that found increasing reliability risks during the transition to a decarbonized electric grid.
The report from PJM said resource retirements are outpacing the construction of new resources, partly due to siting and supply chain issues.
PJM’s failure to clear its massive backlog of renewable energy projects also has been a factor.
Federal regulators approved a PJM plan late last year the grid operator said will speed up the influx of renewables into the grid.
Fossil fuel proponents have touted PJM’s February report as proof the energy transition is moving too fast.
Renewable energy supporters say PJM’s capacity market, which has ensured grid reliability by securing sufficient power supply to meet expected energy demand, will keep doing so as prices respond to fossil fuel retirements.
In its February report, PJM acknowledged its markets provide incentives for capacity resources, with tightening of capacity reserve levels triggering price signals to build new generation for reliability needs.
PJM spokesperson Jeffrey Shields said the grid operator would review the proposal and provide comments to the EPA. Shields said the EPA has been open to input and coordinated with PJM to help address impacts to grid reliability on other environmental initiatives.
Manchin, though, pledged Tuesday to oppose all EPA nominees until the administration stops what he called “government overreach.”
“[W]e appreciate Senators Manchin and Capito for their work to oppose the EPA policy,” Burd said.
Preparing for another legal fight
Morrisey predicted the EPA’s proposal wouldn’t withstand a legal challenge Thursday. Then he promised one.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has placed significant limits on what the EPA can do — we plan on ensuring that those limits are upheld,” Morrisey said in a statement.
The Supreme Court ruled last year in a case West Virginia brought against the EPA that the agency lacks the authority to shift the nation’s power generation to lower-emitting sources than coal.
The conservative-majority court sided with West Virginia in ruling the EPA acted beyond its authority by assuming “major policymaking power” to reshape the nation’s energy sector.
But the court stopped short of stripping the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a news briefing Wednesday his agency is sticking to what he called the agency’s “traditional approach” of controlling pollution from stationary sources under the Clean Air Act.
“We feel really good [that] we are well within those bounds,” Regan said.
Lissa Lynch, a legal director for National Resources Defense Council, argued it’s important that the Supreme Court has already ruled on the section of the Clean Air Act allowing the EPA to determine best emission reduction systems in West Virginia’s case against the EPA. The Natural Resources Defense Council is a global environmental advocacy nonprofit.
“So we’ve answered the really big question of how much can the EPA do and how creative EPA can be,” Lynch said during Friday’s webinar. “Now the remaining questions are going to be much more technical in nature … [on] the type of technical decision-making that, at least historically, expert agencies get a lot of deference in legal decision-making for, because they’re the experts, and judges are not.”
But the Supreme Court this month agreed to reconsider its ruling in a 39-year-old case that established a doctrine of judicial deference given to administrative agencies known as “Chevron deference” after the plaintiff in the case.
A West Virginia-led petition in the new case prompting the court’s review of the doctrine had urged the court to “reconsider Chevron wholesale.”
Morrisey applauded the court’s decision to revisit the doctrine in a statement, calling the doctrine “misguided.” The statement from the Attorney General’s Office said the doctrine has been “manipulated to allow federal agencies to run amuck.”
‘Clean up your act’
The webinars are aimed at communities with environmental justice concerns — of which there are many in West Virginia given the great health costs attributed to the state’s dependence on coal.
Emissions from 10 West Virginia coal-fired plants in 2019 resulted in health impacts that included an estimated 321 deaths and 39 hospital admissions, according to an analysis of data from a federal health risk assessment tool derived by the Clean Air Task Force.
“I have to underscore just how exciting it is to see the administration leaning into their commitments to hold polluters accountable and say, for the first time, you have to clean up your act,” Moffitt said.